For Berlin Art Week, Reethaus and Soundwalk Collective present a live performance by Laraaji based on his study of Hildegard of Bingen and her concept of a sacred “greening force” called viriditas — the power that causes plants to put forth leaves and fruit and human beings to grow and to heal.
This event celebrates the release of the LP catalogue of The Ear is the Eye of the Soul, the Holy See’s intervention at the 61st Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective.
Installed in the Giardino Mistico earlier this year, The Ear is the Eye of the Soul unfolds as a sonic prayer inspired by the compositions and figure of Hildegard of Bingen, a visionary abbess, poet, healer and composer in whose mind cosmology, music and medicine formed one continuous mode of perceiving creation. Celebrating the release of the LP — a sonic catalogue printed at The Vinyl Factory, designed by Irma Boom’s studio, co-produced with Analogue Foundation and distributed by Bella Union and HENI — the sessions at Reethaus bring the project to an audience already attuned to the practice of deep collective listening.
For his contribution, Laraaji chose to respond to O Viridissima Virga, an ode to nature’s freshness and fertility that is unusual in the Hildegard canon for being composed in the G mode. At Reethaus, Laraaji will extemporize on piano, zither and gong in response to Hildegard’s score, engaging with her notion of sound as a form of knowing.
